Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

It is the desire for irreverence as much as anything else that brought me first to poetry. The need to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the body and its functions, claim that one has seen angels in the same breath as one says that there is no god.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.